Spells of Blood and Kin

by Claire Humphrey

  Nick stood up and crossed the bar. Jonathan followed a moment later, carrying both of their pints.

  The foreman looked at Nick with pity and humor. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got something to prove. I get it.”

  “Go easy on him,” Jonathan mouthed, beside Nick.

  “I saw that, asshole,” Nick said to him. “Just shut up and hold my drink.”

  He placed his elbow on the bar, clasped hands with the foreman.

  “Count,” he said to Jonathan.

  “I thought I was supposed to shut up and hold your drink. Never mind. Fine. One … two … three.”

  The foreman’s powerful wrist cocked forward, veins standing out along the tendon. Nick’s much slimmer arm, in the same posture, held ground. Both men clenched their teeth and sweated for a half minute or so.

  “Jesus,” said the foreman. “Not bad for a little guy.”

  “Not bad yourself. Everyone else I’ve been up against lately has gone down by now.”

  “I pump a lot of iron,” said the foreman. “Sorry, guy.” He stepped up the pressure, forcing Nick’s arm back, five degrees, ten degrees.

  “No, I’m sorry.” Nick paused. What kind of a confession could he make? I think I’m turning into a superhero. I think I’m possessed.

  “I know kung fu,” he said. He shrugged his other shoulder and cranked down until the back of the foreman’s hand touched the bar.

  “You know kung fu?” Jonathan said, baffled. “Since when?”

  “It was a joke,” Nick said. “Never mind. Hand me my pint back, okay? Let’s get one for this guy too; he looks like he could use one. Or a rematch?”

  The foreman said flatly, “No, thanks; I think I’m done here.” And he walked out.

  Nick said to Jonathan, “Is it just me, or was that guy kind of a sore loser?”

  Jonathan was still staring. “That was kind of incredible, dude. I’ve never seen you do that before.”

  Nick shrugged and took the pint Jonathan passed back to him. He couldn’t think of another wisecrack just yet, and right now, it felt like the gaps between jokes were deep and dark, and he needed Jonathan to fill them with something normal, something comfortable and familiar.

  Jonathan waited for a long moment, though, and then he turned away, back to their table, leaving Nick standing by the bar with the sweat still running on him and condensation dripping from the pint in his hand.

  Nick wiped his face on the hem of his T-shirt and drained the glass and ordered another. He would follow Jonathan back to their seats; he would have a great, normal night out with his best friend. He would. He just needed a bit of help to get his head back in it.

  MAY 11

  WAXING CRESCENT

  Lissa spent an evening at Yelena Ivanova’s house, drinking tea poured out of a Brown Betty with a crocheted ruff around the spout.

  The ladies of Baba’s generation were mostly dead or too frail to go about, but their daughters and granddaughters still convened a couple of times a month. This was the first night Lissa had attended without Baba. Tonight, Olga Rechkina sat in the good armchair, which was still covered in its clear plastic sleeve; her two canes stood propped against one arm, tripping all passersby. Her daughter passed around a plate of rugelach. Yelena Ivanova had filled another plate with store-bought almond shortbreads.

  Lissa dressed in what she was beginning to think of as her witch clothes: conservative, dark, too heavy for the weather. She braided her hair and twisted it into a fat knot. The ladies were always winding their hair into high tiers of braid work, stuck full of pins. In the mirror in Yelena Ivanova’s hallway, Lissa thought she could see how she’d look in another sixty years.

  Everyone addressed her with respect. Some called her koldun’ia, as Maksim did. But anything spoken in English was circuitous, avoiding irreligious and difficult words like witch and magic. Lissa was treated like something between an alternative health practitioner and a Tupperware salesperson. The men she did not see, except for a brief glimpse of Yelena Ivanova’s husband passing through the kitchen on his way to the garage.

  They sometimes forgot that any of the kolduny had ever been male, she thought. Their respect for Baba had always been tinged with suspicion. Lissa would have it worse, being young.

  But although the men would not meet her, some of them had given their wives requests, or else the wives were taking liberties, for Lissa departed with a full roster of orders, promising them after the next full moon. Eggs to draw pain, eggs for sleeping or waking, eggs to bring luck, eggs that were the magical equivalent of Viagra. Baba had rarely taken so many orders in a single evening. Lissa thought she was being tested.

  Tonight, the sky was thick with red-lit cloud, as it usually was over a city of three million people in smoggy late spring. She descended into the subway tunnels, where the cooler air smelled of mold.

  A hundred other people waited on the platform. An elderly West Indian gentleman with a portfolio; two redheaded girls playing a clapping game; a tall woman and a taller man in shiny black PVC skirts and studded collars; a Portuguese couple arguing; a lovely young man with a rainbow of rubber bracelets, and another with a Union Jack on his denim vest. Young dark-haired men her own age, Italian or Greek: a dozen, at least, and most of them wore the kind of clothes Maksim had described, cargo shorts and plain T-shirts and Converse. Even with the cut on his forehead, the guy they were looking for would have a thousand ringers in this city.

  Lissa sighed and shifted her weight in her uncomfortable shoes. She wanted to be alone in the quiet of her house—too many strangers, too many church ladies, too many eyes upon her, waiting for her to do something wrong.

  When she arrived home, though, and let herself in, the house was muggy and stale. Stella must be at work. The light over the stove had drawn a single fat moth, whose wings beat back and forth over the bulb. In the sink, a centipede ran in circles until she washed it down the drain.

  She went upstairs, stripped off her heavy clothes in favor of a cotton tank top and a wraparound skirt, and let her crimped hair down.

  Then she went out again. The Duke of Lancashire was an easy ten-minute walk, and it had air-conditioning and the Smiths on the jukebox.

  It also had Stella in a ridiculously short kilt, flirting with a table of grad students.

  Lissa sat at the bar and waited to be noticed.

  The bartender got to her first and tossed a coaster down. “What’ll it be?”

  “You’re British,” Lissa said. “That makes sense.”

  “British blokes do tend to be found in British pubs,” he said. “We also serve British beers.” He was pulling a pint for someone; she watched the muscles of his forearm shift under the skin as his fingers closed over the tap. He looked strong but comfortable, like he would give good bear hugs.

  “You hired my British stepsister,” Lissa said.

  “Oh, you’re family, then!” he said. “Rafe Green.” He stuck out his hand.

  “Lissa Nevsky.”

  “But Stella’s a Moore, isn’t she?”

  And before Lissa could get started on the awkward explanation of how she’d taken Mama’s surname instead of keeping her father’s after he’d left, Rafe went on, “Oh, right, you said stepsister. Steel trap.” He tapped his head: topped with a brown toque, maybe shaved underneath. “Half a sec.”

  He slid the pint down the bar to another customer and came back to pour a pint for Lissa. He smiled as he passed it to her: one crooked tooth made his smile look roguish and sweet. “Organic lager. Everyone loves it. On me,” he said. “Ever been in before?”

  Lissa shook her head.

  “Didn’t think so. I’d remember,” Rafe said, smiling a little and looking down at the bar. Then he took a deep breath and howled, “Stella! God, that’s never going to get old.”

  Stella tossed her ponytail, waved good-bye to the table of grad students, and sauntered to the bar.

  “I was wondering if you’d get thirsty eventually,” she said to Lissa with a
tentative smile quite unlike the bold cheer she’d worn for the customers.

  “I had to make sure they were treating you right,” Lissa said.

  “Everyone’s lovely,” Stella assured her, and this time, her eyes smiled too, so it seemed to be true. “Rafe’s great. The food’s even okay.” She dodged the damp towel Rafe threw at her head.

  Lissa leaned down to retrieve it. So did Stella.

  “And he’s hot,” Stella mouthed beneath the bar before standing up and shaking out her hair. “Are you sticking around for dinner?”

  Lissa ducked her chin, feeling heat across her cheeks. “I can’t.”

  “Come on—the special’s good tonight. And I can chat when we’re not busy.”

  “Should have plenty of time for that,” Rafe agreed. “It’s looking like a quiet one.” He took the towel back and wandered away for a fresh one.

  “Come on,” Stella murmured. “You have to admit.”

  “I don’t…” Lissa said. She followed Stella’s look: Rafe’s broad shoulders under a gray T-shirt, a barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps. “I just—I have some reading to do.”

  “I didn’t know you were studying anything,” Stella said.

  “I’m—”

  “Oh my God, you’re going to go secretly read Harry Potter under your blankets or something. Aren’t you? I knew you had to have some kind of vice.”

  “I shouldn’t have come,” Lissa said, digging in her bag, face downturned. She found her wallet, fumbled out a ten, and laid it on the bar. “See you later.”

  She slid off the stool and hurried toward the door. Behind her, Rafe’s voice with that beguiling accent: “Where’s she off to? I said it was on the house.”

  Lissa didn’t hear what Stella replied. She walked back home too quickly in the humid night, feeling limp with sweat, the very air a weight on her eyes.

  MAY 11

  WAXING CRESCENT

  DeShaun was schooling two young women in the ring when Maksim arrived at the gym. Maksim sat on the edge of his old steel desk and watched, twisting paper clips between his fingers. He had put himself on an enforced leave since the night of the full moon, but today, suffused with the calming haze of a couple of eggs, he had missed his regular life too much to hold himself back from visiting. The gym had been his for nearly a decade now, a decade of daily workouts, familiar smells, and people among whom he could feel nearly at home. He was not enough of a businessman to make it thrive, but he was more than enough of a fighter to keep attracting a rotation of students: contenders, sometimes, but people had many reasons to learn to fight, and winning was often the least of them.

  The younger of the girls—Concepción, he thought—was developing a powerful straight; she loved to hammer it into the heavy bag, and she would cheerfully spend round after round doing nothing else if Maksim or DeShaun left her alone. Now she was trying to land it on the older girl, without much luck.

  The older girl was new, and Maksim didn’t even know her name. Whippet thin, with collarbones and sharp sinews standing out beneath Somali-brown skin. She dodged instead of blocking. Concepción lumbered after her, throwing her hard right again and again into empty air.

  Both girls were grinning; DeShaun, instead of advising, stood with folded arms and let them have at it. The key sometimes was to give them their mistakes. Maksim had told him so often enough. When the bell sounded, DeShaun said, “Neither of you is hitting the other. Why is that?”

  “I’m slow,” Concepción said.

  “I’m afraid,” said the other girl. “If I want to hit her, I have to let her get close, and I’m worried I won’t be able to block her ’cause she’s too strong.”

  “Let’s start there,” said DeShaun, and he strapped on a pair of practice pads and began walking them through exercises.

  He didn’t acknowledge Maksim, so the girls didn’t, either; it wasn’t until one of their mothers arrived to pick them up that Concepción waved to him shyly and then saluted him with her fist.

  “Shit,” said DeShaun when the girls had gone. “No wonder you haven’t been around.”

  “I did not wish to frighten off the students,” Maksim said.

  “One look at your face and half of them would swear off the ring for good,” DeShaun agreed. “So why’d you come in today? Things are going fine, you know.”

  “I missed you.” It was simple truth; Maksim did not have many friends.

  Or many sparring partners.

  He’d always have to hold back with DeShaun; it wouldn’t be the kind of joyous brawl he could have with Augusta. But he could make it last longer, and neither he nor DeShaun would come away with broken bones.

  DeShaun started by holding back too. Maksim laughed at him when he realized this. DeShaun shrugged and stepped it up.

  A full twelve rounds. Halfway through, DeShaun stripped off his soaked shirt and slapped it over the ropes. He’d been building muscle lately, Maksim saw; he’d been in the gym every day of the last couple of weeks, with Maksim unavailable.

  He’d be more than capable to take over permanently.

  Maksim did not want to leave this life. He shook sweat from his eyes and stepped in with a combination of hard, mean uppercuts. DeShaun blocked most of it, tucking to take the impacts on his arms.

  Maksim got through, though, and flung DeShaun back against the ropes.

  DeShaun wheezed. “Christ!”

  Maksim pulled a punch he hadn’t meant to throw. He tapped DeShaun on the ear, almost gently, and said, “You do very well.”

  Then he turned away and pulled his shirt over his head to hide the face he thought he might be making.

  Behind him, DeShaun groaned and stretched out his weight on the ropes. “I thought I was.”

  “I might be away for a while longer,” Maksim said. “The classes are yours. I will give you a raise.”

  “Thanks! You think I’m ready to take on the contenders’ training?”

  Maksim said something; he did not know what. Yes, DeShaun was ready; he would be fine—it would all be fine.

  Maksim would not be fine, not until he got out of doors again and ran for a while; not until he could hammer his fists into something unyielding, something he could wreck, something he did not love.

  MAY 12

  WAXING CRESCENT

  Lissa was nearly home from work when the rain began. She held both hands over her head as great fat drops soaked her hair and coursed down her face and neck. The gutters turned into streams and the roofs into sheets of sliding water. Lissa ran up the sidewalk, her sandals slapping flatly.

  Lightning rent the sky in the south, over the lake, and in the flash, she saw Maksim’s face carved white, eyes closed, nostrils wide, his hat a sharp shadow over the bridge of his nose. He was standing beside her lilac tree again, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, ignoring the downpour.

  “Good Lord, are you out of eggs again already?” Lissa said.

  “Nearly so. And I have something else to ask.”

  “Want to come in?”

  He shook his head. “Thank you, no. Fetch the eggs and walk with me.”

  Lissa ducked inside, found the carton; she did not bother with her umbrella since she was already drenched, and the rain was as warm as the air.

  She came back outside to find Maksim awaiting her stoically. Under the beating water, the tension in him was banked but visible; Lissa found herself unwilling to turn her back to him—not out of fear, exactly, but out of concern that he might do something sudden.

  They walked together northward along a street of narrow-roofed Toronto Victorians. Lissa’s braided hair clung to her back in heavy ropes.

  “So if you didn’t only come for eggs…” she said.

  “I wished to ask you about the spell Iadviga made for me,” Maksim said.

  “I haven’t found it in her grimoires. I was thinking maybe her journals.”

  “She left you everything?”

  “Everything she could. But she didn’t have time…” Li
ssa bit down on a sudden hot rush of sorrow.

  “Be easy, koldun’ia. I am sure she would be very pleased with what you are doing. One cannot go from apprentice to master overnight.”

  If he only knew. “It’s just—I miss her, that’s all.”

  Maksim paced, silent, while Lissa wiped rain and tears from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just tired, I think.” And, she thought, in need of someone to talk to about Baba: someone who was more than an acquaintance, someone who was apparently family of a sort, although she still did not understand exactly how. “Do you think you can make it like this until the full moon? That’s the soonest I’d be able to fix anything for you, even if I can figure it all out earlier—it’s kind of an important rule for us.”

  Maksim knit his eyebrows. “I did not know. Of course I will make do with the eggs as long as I must.”

  It wasn’t exactly what she’d asked, but it sounded good enough to go on with. Soaking wet, hair plastered to his neck below his cap, tank top skinned to his body, Maksim did not look very dangerous; he looked like a roofer or a landscaper caught in the bad weather, the menace in him drowned to ordinary sullenness.

  When she looked closer, though, she could see a muscle twitching below his eye.

  “Do you need one now?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not so long as you walk with me. My home is not far.” He hastened his steps, though, as they went north.

  Maksim turned out to live on Dundas, in one of the old Victorians near Bellwoods, above a Portuguese hairdresser. He fumbled for the key, kicked the door open, and tore at his bootlaces.

  Lissa put away the fresh batch of eggs in his refrigerator, which contained a case of Czech beer, an orderly assortment of mustards, and several butcher-paper packages. When she returned to the main room, she could see through the bedroom door Maksim stripping off his wet shirt, and she turned away hastily.

  She looked at the walls, hung with a sword of some kind and a couple of antique guns. A map, with characters in Cyrillic. A signed photograph of George Chuvalo. The sofa and coffee table were elderly and graceful. A bookshelf held military histories in English, Russian, and French.